Several people have asked for details on the bird eye view camera system we had on our robot this year and so I thought I would go ahead and post a general overview of the system here on CD. I should mention that we never found the bird eye view useful and ended up removing it at champs to make room for our gear intake. The bird eye setup is fairly simple. To avoid having to do the stitching and processing ourselves, we used an aftermarket bird eye camera view system for a car (link below). This system comes with 4 wide angle cameras that we placed on each side of the robot and comes with checkered mats that are used to calibrate it. In addition to this system, we used an off the shelf video stream encoder (link below) to send the video stream to the driver station.

Issues and why we decided to remove it/never really used it.
- We found the lag (1ish second - mostly the stream encoder) was to much.
- We found a single camera worked just as well.
- Mounting location requirements for cameras were limiting.
- The streaming encoder by default streamed on blocked port by the FMS. The encoder's UI had some issues changing port setting and would indicate the port had changed when it hadn't.
- The IR remote used by the bird eye system was not legal for FIRST. There are certain settings in the bird eye system that have to be set on power up (every time you turn on robot). To do this we cut off the IR receiver and inserted a uC that was programmed to mimic the IR remote signals required.